Section: Overall Objectives

Main research areas

Numerical models are very useful for environmental applications. Several difficulties must be handled simultaneously, in a multidisciplinary context. For example, in geophysics, media are highly heterogeneous and only few data are available. Stochastic models are thus necessary. Some computational domains are complex 3D geometries, requiring adapted space discretization. Equations modeling flow and transport are transient, requiring also adapted time discretization. Moreover, these equations can be coupled together or with other equations in a global nonlinear system. These large-scale models are very time and memory consuming. High performance computing is thus required to run these types of scientific simulations. Supercomputers and clusters are quite powerful, provided that the numerical models are written with a parallel paradigm.

The team SAGE undertakes research on environmental applications and high performance computing and deals with two subjects:

1. numerical algorithms, involving parallel and grid computing,

2. numerical models applied to hydrogeology and physics.

These two subjects are highly interconnected: the first topic aims at designing numerical algorithms, which lead to high efficiency on parallel and grid architectures; these algorithms are applied to geophysical models.

Moreover, the team SAGE, in collaboration with other partners, develops the software platform H2OLab for groundwater numerical simulations in heterogeneous subsurface.